


This is not a video game.

by kirargent



Series: Femslash Friday Ficlets [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Friday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2259609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirargent/pseuds/kirargent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This place better not be filled with zombies," she mutters, trying the door. It's locked. Charlie pulls a thin strip of wire from her pocket and crouches down to the handle. If this really were a video game, she thinks, this building would <i>definitely</i> be filled with zombies. It's the end of a day in which she's done plenty of zombie-killing already; if this were a video game, killing all the zombies in this building might even take her to the next level.</p><p>As it is, killing them just makes her tired, cranky, and even more gore-spattered than before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is not a video game.

Charlie lops off the head of a rotting corpse and scrunches up her eyes to avoid the spray of guts. "Eugh," she mutters. The zombie apocalypse is not nearly as fun in real life as it is in video games. 

This belief is only further strengthened when Beheaded's ugly friend comes up from her other side and sends her tripping backward over the lip of the sidewalk. It's a miracle she doesn't impale herself on her trusty zombie-killing jumbo-size kitchen knife as she goes down.

"Freakin' zombies," she grumbles, swiping out at its legs as it comes closer. It stumbles, reaches out, and loses a hand when it gets too close. It leans in again, and Charlie pushes herself up from the ground and stabs the bastard through the eye in one rather ungraceful motion. He collapses in an even less graceful motion, becoming a sad pile of bones and sagging flesh on the ground in front of her.

She wipes the dirt from her thoroughly grimy jeans, gives the re-dead undead a half-hearted kick in the stomach, and sets off down the pillaged road.

Aside from a few zombies milling around, she seems to be the only one around. That's okay with Charlie. She's always been alone, even before the end of the world. It makes it easier, she guesses, that she didn't have a family to lose in the first place. It had been harder for Harry. With the state he was in after losing everybody he cared about, it's no wonder he got picked off early.

So yeah, Charlie's alone. Has been for... months? Years?

How long has the end of the world been going on? She's not sure anymore. Probably nobody is.

As she walks, she eats the last remnants of a Kit-Kat bar that's been in her pocket for at least a week, her knife held lazily at her side. Man, she'd had quite a scrap gettin' that Kit-Kat bar; candy is crazy-rare these days. She licks her lips to get every last bit of chocolatey reprieve.

The sun is beginning its daily decline, burning the sky a reddish hue over the horizon. Dilapidated buildings fall into shadow, looming wide and dark on either side of the road. The heat begins to drain away as the sun falls; Charlie crosses her arms over her chest and starts looking for a place to hunker down for the night.

She walks another block, then another. As the streets get darker, her grip on her knife tightens; her eyes move quickly towards each tiny sound she hears.

A mostly-intact storefront catches her attention just as the stars are becoming visible to a straining eye. The doors haven't been busted in, and the only windows appear to be up high. Charlie's footsteps echo too loudly around the deserted buildings as she hurries nearer; she half raises her knife, prepared for an attack from any side. No attack comes. She reaches the store. From a faded, peeling sign, she discerns that this place used to be some kind of cutesy gift shop; underlining an unreadable name is a row of painted greeting cards, decorative keychains, and ornamental candles. A wide window in the door allows her to peer inside, but she sees nothing but darkness. _  
_

"This place better not be filled with zombies," she mutters, trying the door. It's locked. Charlie pulls a thin strip of wire from her pocket and crouches down to the handle. If this really were a video game, she thinks, this building would _definitely_  be filled with zombies. It's the end of a day in which she's done plenty of zombie-killing already; if this were a video game, killing all the zombies in this building might even take her to the next level.

As it is, killing them just makes her tired, cranky, and even more gore-spattered than before.

"Lovely," she grumbles, surveying the zombie-carpeted floor of the shop. Her knife gets a futile wiping-off on her filthy jeans, and she swipes a stray bit of grime-infused red hair from her eyes.

Her battered sneakers fall neatly into the spaces between the corpses, taking her cautiously through to the back of the store. Every shelf and display she passes has been thoroughly ransacked. Near the back of the store, there's a hole busted in the wall leading to the shop next door; presumably, that's how all those zombies got in.

With a tired sigh, Charlie picks her way to a door in the back wall. On occasion, looters will trash a store but forget about the back room. It's there she'll spend the night, whether any supplies are salvageable or not. Hopefully, the walls will all be intact.

Just as the front door was locked, this one is, too. Charlie's makeshift lock-pick hasn't failed her yet; she makes easy work of the cheap lock, and kicks the door in with her knife raised.

No signs of life.

Or, non-life. Re-animated life?

Point is, no zombies. And no people, either. Times like this, people get desperate, can be almost worse than the zombies.

This place should last her the night. It's a small room, square, its walls undamaged. A grungy skylight provides cold, watery illumination as the moon takes place of the sun. By this light, Charlie can inspect the room and its contents. A mini-fridge has been pushed into a corner; it's plugged in, but without electricity, the food will have gone bad anyway. There's a small, long table against one wall. Everything else has been cleared out.

Charlie lets her backpack fall from her tired shoulder and catches the strap before it can fall. She sits on the floor, unzips it, and munches on half of a crumbly granola bar as she wrangles her sleeping bag from its tiny compression case. The sleeping bag has been her most valuable possession, aside from her knife. It kept her warm through the winter, and hides her with surprising efficiency from poor-sighted zombies as long as she pulls it up to cover her head. It's beginning to rip at the bottom, and it's dusted heavily with dirt, but she shakes it out onto the floor, sticks her feet into its mouth, and feels more at home than she does anywhere else.

  


Okay, so not locking the door behind herself was a stupid move.

For the most part, zombies are too uncoordinated to bother with arbitrary things like door handles, and will choose instead to bump repeatedly into a closed door - but sometimes, sometimes they hit the door just right, and their dangling hand or cut-off stump hits the handle, and then, well. Then they swarm.

It's the swarming part that Charlie wakes up to. Blinded by her sleeping bag, she panics, scrambling to a seated position and tussling with the bag until her head pops free. "Crap," she mumbles, looking around. "I'm so dead."

She snatches up her knife from the floor beside her, and puts it to immediate use hacking through a rotting shinbone at her side. The zombie teeters for a long second, then topples forward on top of Charlie's just-vacated sleeping bag. Charlie has already moved on.

Standing now, she slices, stabs, and chops; her feet dance neatly between the fast-multiplying bodies that coat the floor around her. A zombie to her left - a side-step, a slash: a falling corpse. Gnarly fingers close around her wrist. Thanking whatever God is left in this zombie-ridden world that the creep didn't grab her knife-arm, she cuts off its hand, dances back, stabs another zombie through the eyeball -

and proceeds to slip in mound of putrid guts.

In catching herself on her hands, she drops her knife.

Wide-eyed, she stares up at the zombies advancing from the open doorway. And boy, are there a  _lot_  of 'em. Way too many for her and her trusty kitchen knife alone.

This is it, then. This is her Battle of Hogwarts; her last big hoorah. She's gonna die. After surviving this long, she's about to get iced by some brain-dead superjerks who'll eat the flesh off her bones before they're done. Great. Fantastic. Totally the way she's always wanted to go out.

She reaches for her knife, because no way she's goin' down without inflicting some damage first.

The first zombies are close now, advancing at a menacing shuffle.

A spike of pain shoots up from Charlie's wrist when she pushes herself into a crouch, but she grits her teeth and ignores it. Must've banged it up when she fell. Well, she's about to die, anyway. It won't bother her for long.

She brandishes her knife with all the drama appropriate for a last stand. "All right, y' big losers," she hollers. "Come 'n' get me!"

And they do.

In all honesty, she does better than she expected she would. She hacks and dodges and pivots among the body parts strewn across the floor, and the mob of monsters loses numbers.

It's not enough, though. It's not nearly enough. Charlie is one small girl from IT, and that, that is a  _lot_  of zombies.

Well, it's been a nice stint on Earth. She hacked some Super PACS, saved some animals, played a nice load of video games, and made out with a lot of cute girls. Not a bad life, overall.

The knife feels heavier in her hand with each swipe. She's faced hordes of zombies before, but never backed into a corner like this, and never so many on her own. Sweat drips down her forehead and into her eyes; she blinks it away, eyes burning faintly, and keeps fighting, her breath coming short and quick. For each zombie she slices down, another steps up over its mushy body. She's killing herself into a growing ring of decomposing corpses, piling up on top of each other all around her. What a classy death she's gonna have.

And they just keep coming.

By pure luck, a zombie slips a little in the gore-covered floor, waves its arms around comically to regain its balance, and knocks Charlie's arm with enough force to dislodge her knife from her grip. It's unbelievable. It's stupid. It's terrible, and horrible, and shitty, and if this were a video game, Charlie would be cussing out the designers for putting in such an unrealistic dilemma. But this is not a video game, and the panic that claws at Charlie's throat is entirely warranted.

Before her knife can get kicked out of reach, Charlie drops to a crouch - weaving away from a grabbing zombie hand as she does so - and reaches out for her weapon... but a zombie foot, shoe half disintegrated, connects with the knife mid-shuffle, sending it a few inches to the right of Charlie's reaching hand. She scrambles forward, reaches out again - then has to roll out of the way of a gaping-mouthed zombie. "Frack," she grumbles, righting herself. The zombies come closer still, close enough that their stench is almost suffocating; her knife is stepped over, kicked around, and soon disappears under shuffling zombie feet.

" _Crap_ ," Charlie growls. For a scant second longer, she's spared as the zombies struggle to cross over the mound of corpses that surrounds her. With wide, desperate eyes she glances quickly around the room, looking for something,  _anything_  to get herself out of this. She sees nothing. After repeatedly walking into the body-wall, one of the zombies stumbles, and is sent sprawling forward on top of Charlie; she shrieks and jumps backwards, only to feel reaching hands at her back.

"Hey!" a voice calls from behind the army of zombies.

Wow. Is Charlie hallucinating? Has it really come to that?

Heart pounding in her throat, she shoves the zombie off of her and kicks it out of her protective ring of death. Knowing it's futile, she casts her eyes around in search of her knife anyway.

A gunshot blasts through the dull shuffling and groaning of the zombies. Charlie nearly leaps out of her skin. "Hwha?!" she yells. Another gunshot, and another. Charlie gets ahold of herself, whacking a few zombie limbs away from her person and bouncing up onto her tiptoes, straining to get a look beyond the milling crowd of revenants.

Nothing. She's too short.

But the gunshots keep coming, and for each one, Charlie can hear the corresponding thump of a body hitting the floor.

Catching sight of her knife, she dives through a gauntlet of searching zombie hands and makes a desperate grab. The second her fingers close around the familiar handle, she spins, and starts hacking a small clearing for herself. 

The gunshots persist, loud and getting closer. In the split seconds she's not occupied staving off flesh-hungry monsters, Charlie hopes to God that whoever's wielding that gun doesn't plan to use it on her and steal her bag and get the Hell outta Dodge.

Several more minutes of slicing into sloppy zombie guts follow. The massive ranks of monsters subside faster under the dual onslaught. Charlie's got a real shot of making it out of this alive. Assuming her savior doesn't also intend to be her assassin, that is. A chipped-tooth zombie mouth comes careening towards her neck; Charlie beheads it and stops worrying about anything but immediate survival.

  


Charlie's knife hangs at her side. Sweat and dirt cover her like a second skin. Her wrist aches from her fall. Her lungs burn with exertion; her nose is filled with the thick, stagnant stink of decaying bodies. She stands on one side of a sea of corpses, staring warily across to the other side.

A girl stands opposite her, blond, muscled, glaring. Dirt and dried blood decorate her clothes and skin sporadically. She wears jeans that are long from their days of being blue, and a tank top that might've once been black. Her gun is still half cocked, safety off; she's ready to shoot in a second if Charlie proves a threat.

Charlie gulps. "Um," she says, "hi there?" She drops slowly to a crouch and sets her knife on the floor, and raises her hands in the air as she straightens. She drags up a smile, but suspects she still looks terrified half out of her brains. "I'm Charlie," she says. Nerves make her voice high and tight. "Who're you?"

The girl narrows her eyes; the gun twitches in her hold. It's as close to a miracle as anything gets these days that Charlie doesn't squeak in terror. Silence thicker than the stench of the piled zombies stretches out between them. Charlie keeps her smile tacked uneasily in place.

"My name's Jo," the girl says finally.

Charlie half waves one of her raised hands. "Hi," she repeats.

Jo doesn't put her gun away. "You out here all on your own, Charlie?" she asks.

"Uhh. Would you believe me if I said no?"

She might be imagining things, but Jo's lips twitch with what might almost be amusement.

After a long, long pause, she tucks her gun into the waistband of her jeans. All of the breath leaves Charlie's lungs in one huge whoosh.

"You're not gonna kill me?" she asks, voice small.

Jo snorts. "Nah." She looks down to navigate her way among the corpses as she makes her way closer. "It's not smart to be out here alone."

Charlie stands perfectly still as Jo picks her way through the bodies, still vaguely shocked that she survived the past hour.

"What do you say?" Jo asks. She smiles, just a few feet from Charlie now, and her white teeth and dimpled cheeks are the prettiest thing Charlie's seen since her iPad gave up the ghost.

"Um," Charlie says brightly. "Say about what?"

"What do you say we stick together out here?" Jo says. "It'll be safer with two of us."

She's still smiling. There are butterflies eating the walls of Charlie's stomach.

"Oh," she says. She feels herself smile back. "Yeah, sure, I guess." She sticks out her uninjured hand for Jo to shake. "Does that make me Thelma, or Louise?"

**Author's Note:**

> [on tumblr](http://jodyquills.tumblr.com/post/96717171274/charlie-jo-2-5k-warnings-for-violence-gore)


End file.
